Profile

Jordan Geiger explores technology’s global influence

Jordan Geiger stands next to his installation, "Day for Night," an inflatable structure that is part of "Time Mutations (Buffalo)," currently on exhibit in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI

By LAUREN NEWKIRK MAYNARD

As one legend has it, the city of Buffalo’s name comes
from “beau fleuve,” or “beautiful river,”
the name French settlers gave it after first glimpsing the pristine
waters of what is now called the Buffalo Creek.

Jordan Geiger, assistant professor of architecture, has turned
this local folklore into a new question for architects and
designers around the world: “What languages mark landscapes
here today, and what sorts of currents bring them?”

“Beau-Fleuve (You Are Here)” is an interactive
architecture installation Geiger calls “part urban spectacle,
part recording booth,” designed to help younger immigrants
and refugees in Buffalo discover their migration stories.

The project—which includes an installation, workshop and
website—is just one of several he and UB colleagues have
created involving the local community.

“Beau-Fleuve” is a 15-foot tube made of thick beige
felt and embedded with tiny speakers, microphones and custom
electronics. By climbing through the soft, floppy tunnel, children
touch different points wired to sensors that trigger microphones in
the tube that “speak” to them and ask each child to
talk about themselves.

These oral histories are collected as data points and used to
generate a map linking each child’s original country to his
or her new home in Buffalo.

Children crawling through "Beau-Fleuve" trigger microphones that speak to them and ask each child to talk about themselves.

Commissioned by UB’s Humanities Institute and set up last
June at the Grant Street Neighborhood Center on Buffalo’s
West Side, “Beau-Fleuve” was designed by Geiger, with
the assistance of architecture students, to connect these immigrant
and refugee journeys to “the flows of environmental,
political, legal and economic turbulence that now catalyze urban
and global shifts.”

“So much of the immigration process is a mystery for
children, my goal was to help kids increase their awareness about
their individual journeys, while at the same time re-explore the
architecture and embedded technologies of such experiences,”
Geiger explains.

The global influences on architecture make up what Geiger
describes as a “messy tangle” that has inspired him to
create projects like “Beau Fleuve”—influences
that demand new ways of designing, teaching and even thinking about
contemporary architecture.

He has coined a theoretical phrase, “Very Large
Organization” (VLO), referring to things that are both
“at the scale of a human hand and at the scale of the entire
planet at the same time.”

The children's oral histories are collected as data points and used to generate a map linking each child’s original country to his or her new home in Buffalo.

For example, immigration is equally affected by a fingerprint
scanner at an airport and by U.S. immigration policy as it relates
to global databases or climate events that affect mass migration.
“VLOs have resulted in vibrant changes in West
Buffalo’s urban population,” Geiger says.

Since new formations of architecture and landscape now exist as
a result of VLOs, Geiger adds, new educational models are needed to
teach young architects about these relationships and how to embrace
the messy tangle; instructors and designers must recognize the
exciting opportunity and responsibility they have to develop
design-based solutions with an awareness of VLOs.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Geiger holds a master’s
degree in architecture from Columbia University and a
bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from the
University of California, Berkeley. He has taught architecture and
urban design, and worked for several architectural firms in New
York and California; his former San Francisco-based design
studio, Ga-Ga, published and exhibited internationally.

Interestingly, Geiger didn’t switch fields from
comparative literature to architecture; he decided to pursue both
degrees on purpose.

“Comp lit demands that you assimilate and translate ideas
across texts and cultures, and as an architect and teacher, I
constantly remind students of the act of translation,” he
says.

A lover of languages, Geiger speaks four: English, French,
Italian and German. He considers architects, like journalists, to
be “some of our last generalists. I don’t consider
myself an ‘expert’ at any particular topic.”

He and his wife, Miriam Paeslack, an assistant professor in
UB’s Arts Management Program, moved from Berkeley to Buffalo
in 2009. At the university, Geiger began shifting his work from
commercial design to design-based research and teaching, with a
specific focus on how humans and computers interact and how that
relationship affects the built environment.

Geiger conducts research through the UB Center for Architecture
and Situated Technologies (CAST), which focuses on responsive
architecture and pervasive media, and is co-directed by department
chair Omar Khan and Mark Shepard, associate professor of
architecture and media study. Geiger also teaches within
CAST’s pedagogical arm, the Situated
Technologies Research Group.

With Khan and Mark Shepard, he also is co-organizing
MediaCities, an international conference, workshop and exhibition
to be held at UB in May to investigate new relations between
digital media and a multitude of urban conditions.

Geiger’s work also is on display in the UB Art Gallery as
part of “Time Mutations (Buffalo),” exhibitions of work
by artists at UB and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in
Germany, on view through May 4.

Geiger’s contribution, “Day for Night,” a
sprawling, inflatable structure, is a natural fit with the
exhibit’s charge to explore time as a construct that can be
influenced and altered by time zones, the environment and other
global forces.

“Day for Night” was designed to be temporary. Its
surfaces are awash with live audio-video feeds, streamed from
sources 12 time zones removed from Buffalo in order to illustrate
relations between the host city and places far away.

Geiger plans to spend the next two years or so working on a book
of essays about Very Large Organizations and public space, and a
large-scale curatorial project in which he hopes to commission
architects to design works for different VLOs.